🚗 Nissan's New Hybrid Just Launched, and the Internet Is Already Arguing About It
🚙 The all-new 2027 Rogue Hybrid debuted Monday with Nissan's e-Power system, a series hybrid where the gas engine only ever charges a battery, never touches the wheels directly. No plug required. Pricing runs $35,490 to $43,490.
🚗 Toyota Says Automating Its Factories Could Cost $6.4 Billion a Year.
🚙 Capital investment at this scale rarely just disappears into a manufacturer's margin forever. It shows up eventually, in production costs, in pricing strategy, or in the affordability conversation dealers are already having with customers this month.
🚗 GM Finally Shared Power Figures for Its New V-8s
🚙 The power numbers get customers in the door. Reliability is the question your team needs a real answer for before a customer who's already read the comments brings it up first.
🚙 GM made a confident, forward-looking bet in both cases, on removing CarPlay and on skipping straight to EVs, and reality didn't cooperate with either one. CarPlay was fixable with a software update once GM admitted the miss. The hybrid gap isn't fixable that fast. It requires actual product GM doesn't have yet.
🚙 The first-ever West Coast ASOTU CON is live for ticket sales, and pre-release access already moved before the public sale even opened this morning. That kind of early movement on a brand-new market usually means one thing: don't sit on this one.
🚙 Insurance is climbing partly because newer vehicles carry pricier-to-repair electronics, and insurers price that risk directly into premiums. Most shoppers have no idea that connection exists until they're signing paperwork. A customer walking in already primed by a scary headline isn't a lost sale. They're a customer who needs real numbers instead of anxiety doing the talking.
🚙 Ford CEO Jim Farley spent last week publicly rejecting Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's claim that Ford is too entangled with Chinese companies, over a Michigan battery plant licensing CATL technology and a Spanish plant building Geely vehicles for Europe. Farley called it a "basic misunderstanding" that a five-minute call could fix.
🚗 VW Puts a €16 Billion Price Tag on Its Restructuring Plan
🚙 That's on top of a reduction of 50,000 more positions than VW had already planned. Four German plants are now on the table for closure once their current models run out over the next decade, with Volkswagen framing the move as an existential fight against Chinese competitors, steep tariffs, and years of overcapacity.
🚗 The White House Just Called Ford's China Strategy a "Troubling Picture"
🚙 Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent Ford CEO Jim Farley a letter this week expressing "profound concern" over the automaker's ties to Chinese companies, specifically its CATL battery licensing deal, its dealings with Geely and BYD, and Farley's own comments floating Chinese joint ventures on U.S. soil.
🚙 The next three to five years are expected to separate the leaders from the laggards, according to Gartner's Pedro Pacheco. On the factory floor, AI vision systems are already catching defects human eyes miss consistently. In dealerships, chatbots have occasionally gone rogue, one reportedly offered to sell a Chevrolet Tahoe for $1.
🚗 Global Dealers Are Asking AI the Same Question American Dealers Asked a Year Ago
🚙 One of our own sat in on a major automotive gathering in Istanbul this week, where AI dominated the agenda and the audience, largely dealership owners and senior leaders, wasn't shy about pushing back on speakers who talked adoption without proof it moves the needle.
🚙 The Cybercab is a two-seat, gold-colored robotaxi with butterfly doors and, notably, no steering wheel, no pedals, and no mirrors. It runs entirely on Tesla's Full Self-Driving software with zero manual override if anything goes wrong. Roughly 45 vehicles are authorized to operate in Austin today.
🚙 Great customer service, apparently, extends to wildlife too. Shoutout to Carl, the whole team at Walser Nissan Coon Rapids, and the folks at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Minnesota for giving a scrappy young gull a second shot.
🚗 Across Dealerships, One Group of Employees Is Most at Risk
🚙 Eighty percent of dealership employees say they're satisfied at work. That number collapses to 64% for anyone with one to three years on the job, exactly the stretch where a dealership can least afford to lose someone: after the training investment, before the loyalty sets in.
🚗 47 Vans on the Road, and That's Not Even the Impressive Part
🚙 Bozard rebuilt its BDC from 32 screens down to 9, and COO/GM Ed Roberts still thinks that's twice what's necessary. The flashy number gets the headline. The duplicate data entry nobody wanted to audit is usually where the real money's hiding.
🚗 Are Dealer-Quoted Monthly Payments the Next FTC Compliance Risk?
🚙 The FTC already sent warning letters to 97 dealerships in March, with a group potentially on the hook for close to $80 million in fines. Now there's a new gap on the radar, and this one's built into how nearly every store quotes a payment.
🚗 Toyota and Honda May Get Stuck With the Bill for Trump's Canada Tariffs
🚙 Toyota exports the RAV4 from Canada, Honda the CR-V, both among America's best-selling SUVs. Toyota already absorbed $8.8 billion in tariff costs last year and is doubling down on U.S. production instead. Honda says it may not build its planned eighth North American plant at all without a USMCA extension.
🚗 Stellantis Dealers Say the Carvana Strategy Is Missing the Most Important Part
🚙 One dealer told Automotive News that a sales manager posing as a customer called a Carvana Stellantis store about a check engine light and was told to just take it to an independent mechanic. "That is just not what our network needs," the dealer said. "You do that, you'll sell someone one car, and you'll never sell them a car again."
🚙 A franchise dealer wants to “skip the salesperson,” Walmart turns charging into a retail advantage, and Spirit’s internal data hits bankruptcy court.
🚙 Amazon and Walmart have spent years testing drone delivery without fully cracking consumer logistics at scale. Jack Demmer found the use case those companies never had: a fixed, short-range need between a dealership's own buildings.
🚗 Polestar Says It Was Blindsided. Dealers Say That's Not the Whole Story.
🚙 Polestar is telling U.S. dealers it never saw the ban coming. One of those dealers is suing for $25 million, arguing the company saw it coming from a mile away and used the government as a convenient exit. Both accounts can't be fully true.
🚗 Trump Just Threatened to Double Canada's Auto Tariff to 50%
🚙 The deal that collapsed Friday would have cut Canadian auto tariffs from 25% to 15%. USTR Jamieson Greer called the fallout a "tempest in a teapot," and there's real precedent for skepticism: Trump made a similar 50% tariff threat against Canadian-made aircraft in January that never materialized.
